UNH physics researcher in search of 'sun on earth'

Sunday

May 29, 2011 at 2:00 AM

DURHAM — For Kai Germaschewski, the second time was the charm.

Paul Briand

DURHAM — For Kai Germaschewski, the second time was the charm.

The first time the University of New Hampshire physicist applied for a U.S. Department of Energy grant, he didn't get it. This year, his second attempt, he was chosen among 1,000 applicants for the prestigious $750,000, five-year government grant to advance his research on fusion energy.

The money will help Germaschewski get the help and resources he needs to research what he describes as "trying to create sun on Earth" through a fusion process involving plasma. The ultimate goal, he said, is to create fusion power plants that create energy from hydrogen, something he envisions could be possible in 30 to 40 years.

The two building blocks of his research are plasma and fusion. So what is plasma?

Germaschewski explains it this way: At high enough temperatures, solid becomes a liquid, liquid becomes gas and gas becomes plasma. Plasma has innumerable electrically charged particles flying around. It doesn't naturally occur on Earth, but is most evident in the universe as the sun.

Fusion takes certain elements and fuses them together to create something heavier — two hydrogen atoms fused together form helium, for example. The idea behind fusion plasma is to fuse the hydrogen protons in plasma.

"Eventually they will fuse together and form helium," he said, a by-product of which is heat and energy.

The trick — and this is where his research comes in — is to control and channel the energy from what he calls "the burning plasma" in an electro-magnetic field as to make it a usable and transmittable form of energy.

In the way that fission nuclear plants create electrical energy from uranium, fusion plasma plants would create electrical energy from hydrogen, the lightest and most abundant chemical element on Earth. "There are still many things that aren't very well understood," Germaschewski said about the field of fusion plasma.

The potential instability of trying to harness the energy in a magnetic field is one.

His job as a researcher is not to create plasma (you need to heat gas to 100 million degrees centigrade, he said) nor build the prototype for a fusion plasma device (folks in France are taking care of that, he said). His job is to build the computer models to run tests and simulations of how the fusion would occur and be contained.

This requires a marriage of physics and computing, specifically the ability to write code for his simulations. "That's something that's becoming increasingly more important in physics today," he said of computational physics — the dual abilities at theory and computer code.

The computer files he generates are massive. The computer image of your son's birthday party is maybe 2.5 megabytes. Each of his files are up to 5 gigabytes, and each simulation might have 1,000 files. You're into the terabytes here and that requires a lot of computing power that UNH doesn't have, so the simulations are uploaded to the University of California at Berkeley to run.

Germaschewski came to UNH to do his post-doctoral research in 2003. He had received his Ph.D. in physics in Germany in 2001 and had spent two years at the University of Iowa. He left UNH in 2007 to go to City University in New York City and returned a year later in 2008 when a faculty position opened up.

It's not as unusual as it might seem for a UNH physicist to beat out other uber-smart scientists from MIT and other colleges and universities perhaps better known for their technology and science programs.

But, as Germaschewski noted, UNH's stature in that regard has been growing over the years and is now seen as having one of the best science/technology programs in the country.

He is the first UNH faculty member to receive a grant through the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Science, which started the funding program in 2009.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.

Advertise

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
seacoastonline.com ~ 111 New Hampshire Ave., Portsmouth, NH 03801 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service